Recipients of the University of Hawaii 2003 Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research Announced

Three University of Hawaiʻi professors have been awarded the Regents‘ Medal for Excellence in Research.

Presented by the Board of Regents, the award for research excellence recognizes faculty members whose scholarly contributions expand the boundaries of knowledge and enrich the lives of students and the community.

These year's recipients are:

Andrew Harris, an assistant professor in the Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at UH Mānoa, is an expert in volcanic studies. The intensity of his innovation and productivity is illustrated by the 33 papers he has published since he came to UH Mānoa in 1999. His work initially focused on the analysis of thermal data from volcanoes using satellites. He recently developed a real-time thermal monitoring device for the Kilauea and Stromboli volcanoes. These provide frequent (every second) temperature measurements, which are used to study the thermal dynamics of the volcanoes.

Laurence N. Kolonel, the Deputy Director of the Cancer Research Center of Hawaiʻi, is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of epidemiology, prostate cancer, and the relationship between diet and cancer. His early published studies demonstrated the role of environmental factors in the etiology of cancer leading to differential incidence and mortality rates between ethnic groups. His pioneering research demonstrated the importance of diet in the development of cancer in humans.

James B. Nation, a UH Mānoa mathematics professor, has earned a truly international reputation for the depth of his insight into lattice theory. Nation created the field of congruence varieties, now regarded as a central part of lattice theory and universal algebra. He went on to one of his most famous feats, the solution of the Jónsson conjecture; he was able to prove the correctness of an elegant characterization of the class of free lattices.